Starship Cabin 1 Spotted! What Did SpaceX Hide? Flight 15 Final Prep! [21:44]

YouTube ^ | October 23, 2026 | What about it!?

[SunkenCiv]

The first Starship built for astronauts may already be standing inside the Starfactory. We think we found it. And today we take you through it, deck by deck, from the docking port in the nose down to the airlock that opens onto the Moon. NASA released a new Moon Base update, with the plan for a permanent base at the lunar south pole, and Starship just picked up one more cargo contract for the Moon. At Starbase, the service platform is off Pad 2, the chopsticks are rehearsing for Flight 15, and SpaceX showed us, for the first time, what catching a ship will look like. Oh, and Japan also launched a spacecraft to a moon of Mars that will bring a piece of it back to Earth. So, what's inside Cabin One? 

Starship Cabin 1 Spotted! What Did SpaceX Hide? Flight 15 Final Prep! | 21:44 
What about it!? | 673K subscribers | 44,375 views | October 23, 2026

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: cabinone; elonmusk; nasa; spacex; starship; whataboutit

[SunkenCiv]

00:00 Inside the Starship Factory
03:13 Designing the Lunar Living Quarters
07:48 NASA's Roadmap to a Permanent Moon Base
10:56 New Contracts and Future Flight Cadence
13:00 Preparing for the Historic Ship Catch
16:06 Japan's Ambitious Mission to the Martian Moons

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YouTube transcript would normally have been reformatted at textformatter.ai but this one was done largely by hand and will likely appear below.

[SunkenCiv]

🚀🛰️

[SunkenCiv]

Transcript

Chapter 1: Inside the Starship Factory

The first starship built for astronauts may already be standing inside the star factory. We think we found it and today we take you through it deck by deck from the docking port in the nose down to the airlock that opens onto the moon. NASA released a new moon base update with the plan for a permanent base at the lunar south pole and starship just picked up one more cargo contract for the moon. At Starbase, the service platform is off pad 2. The chopsticks are rehearsing for flight 15. And SpaceX showed us for the first time what catching a ship will look like. Oh, and Japan also launched a spacecraft to a moon of Mars that will bring a piece of it back to Earth. So, what’s inside cabin 1? My name is Felix. Welcome to What About It? Let’s dive right in.

Starship updates. Last episode, we looked at NASA’s new Starship road map, and one line on that chart was new to all of us. Cabin 1 build complete by the end of this year. Today, we go through cabin 1 step by step because we think we know where it is. We identified a nose cone that is very likely to be Cabin 1. It is already in production, and if our guess about this nose cone is right, it has been in work since April or May.

Three weeks ago, with the structural test nose cone gone from Massy’s and the tile adhesion test nose cone off to the scrapyard, exactly one unusual nose cone was left inside the Star Factory. It has been parked on the same workstation since April and hasn’t moved since. And it is built differently. It does not have the usual stringers and internal structure of a regular ship nose. The patterns on its skin have been added slowly over several months, and most of them are light tech welds.

Nothing that holds major structure. Something else is going on there. Then on Sunday new photos through the factory windows. It has a much flatter nose tip than any Starship we’ve ever seen, supporting the idea that this must be the one. A regular ship nose comes to a point because the header tanks needed for a starship catch live up there. This one ends in a flat dome with a port hole under it in the middle.

The flatter tip would make a lot of sense for the nose docking mechanism and the arrow cap over it just like in NASA’s renders. Remember the two lines on the road map. A passive docking fit check this quarter. Docking system and arrow cover integration in the first quarter of next year. A nose with a flat top is what you’d build for that.

And of course, Elliot made us a model that shows where it stands inside the Star Factory along the window front facing Highway 4. That’s actually why we can see it at all. He also made a cutaway animation so we can walk through the inside the way we think SpaceX is laying it out.

[SunkenCiv]

Transcript

Chapter 2: Designing the Lunar Living Quarters

To be clear, this is our own interpretation. Nobody outside SpaceX and NASA has seen the inside of cabin 1, but the requirements are public and they tell you a lot. So at the top there will need to be the docking port and airlock for inorbit docking procedures. This is where Orion docks nose tonose and where astronauts float from one spacecraft into the other. For Artemis 3 next year, that is the whole point of the test flight. Orion docking with both landers in Earth orbit. And right below it is the cabin itself, which is likely going to have three floors.

The uppermost one, right under the nose docking mechanism, is the flight and living deck. It will have the cockpit, which right now looks to be some sort of patwalk structure on one side facing the windows, accessible through stairs when landed and by just floating up there in microgravity. Think about that for a second. A cockpit you climb a staircase to on the moon and swim to in orbit. The rest of this floor will likely have sleeping quarters in the form of closet-like cabins. It will also have science and operation stations. We simply don’t know what those will look like, but we expect NASA and SpaceX to show them as soon as there is something substantial to show, likely sometime next year.

After all, the road map has operations testing of cabin 1 in the first quarter. People working inside it on the ground and that is when the pictures come. And then there is the middle floor. It’ll likely be storage space for everything needed on the surface. NASA’s requirement for both SpaceX and Blue Origin is 15 metric tons or about 33,000 lbs to the lunar surface as outlined in the IA presentation we talked about last episode. Exactly for that, SpaceX will have to leave substantial volume as a cargo hold. 15 tons is roughly the mass of a complete Apollo Luna module fully fueled and it has to be packed in a way that one crew can unload it. So this floor is less living room and more warehouse. And of course this cargo hold then needs to be connected to the third level which sits right above the main propellant tanks.

And this is where the second airlock lives in a horizontal configuration opening outward when HLS is standing on the lunar surface. This air log is substantially larger than the one in the nose because it has to act as the loading and unloading port for all the equipment, rovers, construction material, base modules, everything that goes down to the surface. It will include the elevator setup that NASA astronauts already tested at Starbase. And the door of this airlock will likely double as a boom for that crane and lift setup. Open the door and the door becomes the arm that holds the elevator out over the side of the ship. Whoa. Imagine that view.

So, what is cabin one? Cabin one is the demonstrator. It will never be integrated into an actual HLS Starship, but it is already past the initial design phase, and that phase has likely been going on since 2020 when NASA first put SpaceX under contract for a lander study. So this is not just a mockup to show NASA and the world what it could look like. It is an advanced stage of the design and its main job is to bring all the parts together into the real form factor. The docking port, the decks, the stairs, the airlocks and the elevator in the actual diameter of a Starship so that every interface gets checked against every other interace.

And once this is finished, a real version gets built using cabin one as the blueprint. The road map puts the airlock demo in the second quarter of next year. That is the first time we’ll see a hatch open on something that looks like a moonlander. So, just for giggles, if you had to live in that top floor for a week, what’s the one thing it has to have? Let’s hear it. A karaoke machine or a dance floor to practice moon walking? What will it be? Let me know in the comments. That should be fun. And if you want to dig deeper, the Starship Wiki has a good overview page on HLS. Shout out to the team keeping that page alive. Well done. Link is in the description.

[SunkenCiv]

Transcript

Chapter 3: NASA’s Roadmap to a Permanent Moon Base

We’ll keep watching that window front. Which brings us directly to the reason Cabin 1 exists. On Tuesday, NASA released a new video outlining its progress and its goals on the road to the Luna base. HLS Starship and Blue Moon Mark II are the two tools NASA needs to build the first permanently inhabited base at the moon’s south pole and the video shows what they’ll be carrying. It’s pretty simple. The plan comes in three phases. Phase one runs from now to 2029. NASA calls it gain reliable access, experiment, and learn more than 20 robotic landings near the South Pole to find sites for the base.

Phase two, 2029 to 2032. Build and expand. Power, cargo, transport, logistics, and communications spread over several locations. Phase three from 2032 on live and work on the moon with habitats and a permanent outpost. Oh boy. And phase two is where the big landers come in. You don’t build a base with the payload of a small commercial lander. You build it with 15 tons per flight. possibly more. And the new video Viper, the ice hunting rover NASA cancelled and then brought back, is finished and sitting in a clean room at Johnson. It flies on Blue Origin’s second Blue Moon Mark 1 lander late next year and then drives for about a 100 days and more than 30 kilometers into the permanently shadowed craters where the ice should be. It better be there.

NASA calls it the scout for the moon base. Then the lunar terrain vehicles, the cars for the astronauts. Astrolabs CLV1 and Luna outposts Pegasus, both crude and both remote control led from Earth because they land before the crew does and have to drive to the landing site on their own. Flight hardware is due at the end of 2027, so that is not far out at all. Blue Origin delivers them to the South Pole by 2028. And NASA’s head of surface mobility summed pressurized rover from JAXA, the one astronauts live in for weeks, is penciled in for a Starship cargo lander no earlier than 2032. Base modules, power plants, all of it goes through a door like the one we just walked through on the third floor of cabin 1.

The rovers in this video are the advanced team. Starship and Blue Moon are the trucks. One more thing on NASA. This Friday afternoon, NASA is holding a briefing at Kennedy on accelerating Artemis with the administrator and the Artemis program manager. By the time you’re watching this, it may already have happened. If there is anything in it for Starship, you’ll get it in the next episode. And Starship will not only deliver cargo to the moon for NASA’s Artemis and for SpaceX’s own plans.

[SunkenCiv]

Transcript

Chapter 4: New Contracts and Future Flight Cadence

We’ve also secured important new business, winning three additional human spaceflight missions on Dragon, which will take us through 2028. On SpaceX’s thirdarter earnings call on Tuesday, Gwyn Shotwell announced that SpaceX already has one more contract for Luna cargo delivery with Starship. It came in a pretty impressive list. In addition, we signed 18 new National Security Space Launch missions, a contract to deliver payload to the lunar surface with Starship, and three new Starfall missions on Starship. 18 new national security launches, three more crude dragon missions running through 2028, three Starfall missions on Starship, and a new contract to deliver a payload to the lunar surface using Starship.

She didn’t say who the customer is. The one we know from this summer is ispace, the Japanese lander company which booked 500 kg on a Starship moon flight in July. Whether that is the one or a new one, somebody is paying for cargo space on a Starship to the moon before a Starship has ever been caught. And since we’re on the call already, Musk said, “We expect Starship to fly uh weekly uh at some point in the first half next year and then second half next year, twice weekly or or maybe even more frequently than that by the end of next year.” Keep that number in mind when we get to the pad.

Yes, you’ve reached the middle of the video. You made it. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for watching and liking the video. And if you’re among the 40% who haven’t subscribed yet, and there was at least one video you learned something new from, it would mean the world to me if you did. It is free and it genuinely helps more people find my channel. Want to make my world even easier? There is only one place you’d rather be. The Y Members Club on Patreon and right here on YouTube. Click the card or the join button under the video. You are the reason we keep doing this. Thank you so much. You rock.

[SunkenCiv]

Transcript

Chapter 5: Preparing for the Historic Ship Catch

And last but not least for the Starship segment, Starbase. SpaceX has removed the maintenance platform from the launch mount at pad 2 and is now doing the final prep work on the pad itself. Early Monday morning, the service structure rolled away from the mount and parked near the gate of the launch complex. That structure only sits on the mount while people work on it. When it leaves, the pad is handed back to the rocket. And on Tuesday, two deluge tests. Twice in one afternoon, the mount disappeared in a wall of water, both while the chopsticks were being exercised. Pu is clean and waiting for a booster.

Booster 22 is still in Mega Bay 1 with its engines on, and the next road closure notice will tell us when it rolls. Heck, by the time you’re watching this, it may already be on the mount for its static fire. And maybe even more importantly, SpaceX is already testing for the ship and booster catch on the next flight. The chopstick runs on Tuesday were likely catch rehearsals. There may be a few fit tests with a ship first, checking the catch rails and the hardware the ship hangs from before the booster shows up. As always, we’ll have to wait and see. But the direction is clear, and it’s the same direction NASA’s chart points. Both stages caught on flight 15.

That’ll be a historic moment in space flight. Catching both stages will for the first time ever recover the entire rocket. I can’t overstate what this means. Gaining the ability to reuse the entire rocket is the key that opens the door to a future in space flight that is currently hard to imagine. Every orbital rocket before Starship threw away at least its upper stage. Every single one. since 1957. If flight 15 works, that ends. And Shotwell said on the call that we have had significant constructive engagement with the FAA and we expect the licenses for our flight 15 to include return to launch site and tower catch for both stages.

On paper, the flight is no earlier than November 8th. Musk’s guess is a little before Thanksgiving, whatever that means. And SpaceX released a stunning animation showing the plan for the first time. Look at this. No more speculation. This is what it will look like, only even better when it’s real. It opens on the ground, looking up through the launch mount at the tower with the arms spread wide. The ship comes in belly first, flap steering the whole way down. Then the flip. The ship drops toward the tower and slides down past the top of the arms. The arms close. A Starship hanging in the chopsticks. We’ve seen a booster do that three times. We’ve never seen it with a ship. And on the same call, Musk gave the odds. Success is not guaranteed, but more likely than not. Okay. The goal for flight 16 after that, fly both stages again.

[SunkenCiv]

Transcript

Chapter 6: Japan’s Ambitious Mission to the Martian Moons

And now, let’s talk about something very important for me. The launch that didn’t get the attention it deserved. On Tuesday morning in Japan, JAXA launched MMX, the Martian moon’s exploration mission from Tanagashima. The rocket was the biggest H3 configuration there is. Two main engines and four solid boosters on its 10th flight. 71 minutes after liftoff, MMX separated onto its trajectory to Mars. The mission costs about $580 million. It’s the only Mars launch in this year’s window. And the goal is something no spacecraft has ever done. Land on a moon of Mars and bring a piece of it home.

Why Phobos? Two reasons. Nobody knows where the moons of Mars came from. Either they are captured asteroids or they are debris from a giant impact on Mars. The same way our own moon was formed. The samples will settle that. And Phobos orbits only 6,000 kilometers above Mars. Every big impact on Mars for billions of years has thrown material up there. So a scoop of Phobos is also a scoop of Mars, old Mars, possibly with water and organics in it. It might be the cheapest Mars sample return anyone has come up with.

The cruise takes about 10 months with Mars arrival in August of next year. 1 month after that, MMX moves into what is called a quasi satellite orbit around Phobos. Phobos is only 27 kilometers long and its gravity is roughly 117,000 of Earth’s. Yeah, you cannot really orbit something like that the normal way. So, the spacecraft flies a loop around it that is really an orbit around Mars, just tuned to stay close. From there, more than a year of scouting. 4K and 8K cameras, a laser altimeter, a dust counter, a near infrared spectrometer from France, and NASA’s Megan instrument, a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer that reads the elements of the surface from orbit.

All of it feeds one question. Where can we land safely? And where is it worth landing? And then comes the epic part. Before the mother ship lands, it drops a rover. Edifix, built by the French and German space agencies and named after the little dog in the asterisk comics. 25 kg on Earth. On Phobos, it weighs about 15 g. Nothing. So there is no landing system. During one of the closest passes, 40 to 100 m above the surface, MMX simply lets go. The rover falls for about a minute, hits the ground at less than 1 meter per second, bounces a few times and then writes itself on its own. Then the four solar panels open, and if they don’t open, the rover is dead. So that part is arguably more important than the landing itself. And then Edifix drives slowly. We are talking millimeters per second because anything faster could bounce it right off a moon with an escape velocity of about 11 m per second. Yeah, Phobos is really not much.

Its job is to scout for the big landing. It images the ground at a tenth of a millimeter resolution, measures the temperature, reads the minerals with a spectrometer, and tells the team what the surface actually is. solid rock or something like powder snow, nobody knows. Edifix is scheduled for early 2029 and runs for about a 100 days. And with that data, MMX picks a spot and lands twice. Each landing is a touch and go that takes about 2 and 1/2 hours on the surface. A robotic arm fires a corora into the ground at least 2 cm deep. A second sampler built in the US by Honeybee Robotics sits next to a landing foot and blows a puff of gas to push surface dust into a container. The target at least 10 g. That doesn’t sound like much, but Hayabuza 2, for example, brought back 5.4 g from Ryugu and rewrote the textbooks with it. And then those samples go into the return capsule.

MMX makes a few close flybys of Damos on the way out leaves Mars in late 2030 and the capsule lands in Australia in 2031. The same team that caught two asteroid samples is going for a moon of Mars. And if everything goes according to plan, 5 years from now, a piece of Phobos sits in a lab in Japan. And then we’ll find out whether Mars has two moons or two captured rocks. So, what do you think? Is Phobos a captured asteroid or a piece of Mars? Place your bets now and in 2031, we’ll see who was right.

And that’s it for today. Smash that like button, subscribe for more. This is what fuels the algorithm and this is how you can help us for free. Check out our epic shirts in your favorite space nerd store. Our all-time favorite Raptor engine design and countless others are there for you to explore. Click the card or the US or worldwide link in the description. History is being written in real time. If you want to catch the other historic stories from recent weeks, click the video on screen and continue your journey now. Thank you so much for watching and I’ll see you again in the next episode.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

[PAR35]

the chopsticks are rehearsing

What does that even mean? Chinese are running things?

[Billthedrill]

The Moon Men aren’t gonna take this lying down. Even at 1/6 gravity.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Link to ChatGPT Video Transcript Summary

[SmokingJoe]

Grok:

Starship (SpaceX’s HLS / Human Landing System variant) is in advanced but still incomplete development for Moon missions as of late October 2026. It has achieved key vehicle milestones, but critical lunar-specific capabilities—especially large-scale orbital cryogenic propellant transfer, a full crew cabin, landing systems, and an uncrewed lunar landing demo—remain ahead.​
Starship reached orbit for the first time on Flight 14 (September 28, 2026), deploying Starlink V3 satellites. Earlier flights were suborbital. Version 3 (V3) hardware is flying, with booster catches already demonstrated multiple times.​

Near-term goals for late 2026 include the first Ship (upper stage) catch, first Florida launch, possible V3 booster reflight, and completing “Cabin One” (a high-fidelity ground crew cabin for testing and training).​
Artemis III (targeted ~Q3 2027): Low-Earth-orbit docking demonstration only. A modified V3 Starship (with docking system and nose cover, no full crew cabin for astronauts to enter) will rendezvous/dock with Orion. No refueling or lunar landing required.​

A lunar Starship needs massive propellant in orbit (depot + tankers). NASA safety panel estimates ~22 launches; Elon Musk says 6–8 with improved performance. This is the biggest schedule risk—high flight rates and successful cryogenic transfer are essential. Even optimistic rates could take months to fully fuel a mission.​
Starship is the most mature large-scale lunar lander architecture in development and the primary path for NASA's early crewed landings, but it is not yet “Moon-ready.” Vehicle flight testing is progressing rapidly (orbit achieved), ground hardware (cabin, docking) is advancing, and NASA has confidence in the approach with parallel Blue Origin development.

However, the uncrewed lunar demo and full refueling capability are still ~1 year away under current targets, and the first crewed landing is planned for 2028. Schedules have already slipped multiple times since the 2021 contract, and further delays are possible given the number of “firsts” still required.​

[Samurai_Jack]

It’s a little bit strange when you mention what’s going on with SpaceX it’s become something of a litmus test. A woke democrat will be instantly triggered and will start seething with anger. Face starts to turn red, twitching in their eyes. Shortly, when the steam emits from their ears, they’ll say something stupid like ‘musk is an idiot’.

[SmokingJoe]

Felix Schlang (the host of the YouTube channel “What about it!?”) is from Germany.

He was born and raised in the Eifel region of Germany (a rural, volcanic area in Rhineland-Palatinate, associated with places like Adenau). He has described growing up in a remote part of the country where the Milky Way was visible to the naked eye, which fueled his early interest in space and astronomy.

He later moved with his family to Florida (near Cape Canaveral) to be closer to SpaceX and other space activities, but he is German by origin and retains strong ties there. The channel itself is listed under the United States on YouTube.

[Vaduz]

Going to the moon for any reason is as useful as wanting to get a ticket to ride a comet for an orbit or two.

Moon landings are 100% waste of time and money.

[SmokingJoe]

Yep.
Democrats are fuming primarily because Musk helped Trump win 2024 and is helping Republicans fight Democrats this year.

[oldasrocks]

I agree moon landings are a waste of time. Imagine the same money and engineering talent used to map and explore our oceans.

[SunkenCiv]

Here’s hoping it leads to their early onset blood pressure issues and results in shortened lifespans for the lot of ‘em.

[SunkenCiv]

It was general tso, they worked on it some more, and now specific tso.